This weekend will be very warm for southeast Michigan with Saturday’s high expected to reach 60F and the mid to upper 70sF on Sunday! This will be short lived as a cold front passes through our area sometime Monday morning or early afternoon.
The reason for this brief warm up is because of an upper-level system that will be moving through the southern plains on Sunday. The heights at 500mb will rise ahead of the upper-level trough which will put Michigan in a southwest flow. This southwest flow will cause the warm front to lift to our north Saturday night causing warm, moist air to move into our region. This can be seen on the image below which shows the set up at 500mb on the left and the set up at the surface on the right. At this time, the warm front will be somewhere in northern Lower Michigan which puts southeast Michigan in the warm sector.
Image courtesy of PSU eWall
The warm temperatures will not last very long with the cold front passes through on Monday causing the winds to shift to the northwest which will bring in cooler, drier air as shown on the next image below.
Image courtesy of PSU eWall
As the cold front approaches southeast Michigan, there is a good chance of thunderstorms which could become strong to possibly severe Sunday evening or Monday morning. I wouldn’t expect severe storms due to the timing of the cold front passing. There will be less instability in the boundary layer in the morning hours causing the storms to be weaker. However, if the storms are able to become strong to severe, the main threat would be strong straight-line winds. The image below shows the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) convective outlook for Sunday. As of earlier this morning they expect a low chance of severe weather for our area but that can change when the system moves closer and the details become clearer.
Image courtesy of SPC
Out in the Midwest in parts of Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota are expecting a severe weather outbreak for Sunday with the possibility of strong tornadoes!
